William Joyce

William "Lord Haw-Haw" Joyce (24 April 1906-3 January 1946) was a Nazi propagandist from the United Kingdom. Joyce, a former speaker for the British Union of Fascists, headed to Nazi Germany and joined the Nazi Party, and he broadcast propaganda messages to Britain during World War II. In 1946, he became the penultimate British person to be executed for treason, being hanged the day before Theodore Schurch.

Biography
William Joyce was born on 24 April 1906 in New York City, New York, United States to an Irish father and an English mother, and the family moved back to Galway, Ireland just a few years after Joyce's birth. Joyce attended the St. Igatius College in Galway from 1915 to 1921, and he claimed that he helped the Blacks and Tans against the Irish Republican Army during the Irish War of Independence, as both Joyce and his father were unionists (despite being Catholics). In 1921, he left for England after an assassination attempt by the IRA, and he entered Birkbeck College's officer training corps after being rejected from the British Army due to lying about his age.

On 22 October 1924, he received a deep razor slash on his right cheek (a Cheshire grin, or Glasgow smile) from communists while attending a UK Conservative Party rally, and he claimed that his attackers were Jews. In 1932, he joined Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists and became known as a dynamic speaker, and he became the BUF Director of Propaganda in 1934. In 1937, Mosley sacked him, so he left for Nazi Germany in August 1939. Joyce became a naturalized citizen of Germany in 1940, and he was used by the Nazi Party to transmit propaganda broadcasts to the UK, opening with the phrase "Germany calling, Germany calling" in an upper-class English accent. Joyce was well-informed about military and political events, and he made several broadcasts until the war's end in 1945. On 28 May 1945, he was captured by the British Army at Flensburg on the border with Denmark, and he was sentenced to death for treason after it was revealed that he had a British passport at the time of his propaganda broadcasts from Germany. He was hanged on 3 January 1946, the day before the last British man executed for treason, Theodore Schurch.